The Fire Rainbows

Ensconced upon an ebon throne,
The crescent moon descends. You can

Do this in English. You still can.
You don’t have to be so human.

You can let us hum with nonsense
And be the words beyond the meant.

You don’t have to suffer for thought.
You can let us sing in your head.

This summer is almost over.
Green things and many humans, too,

Including the ones you think on,
Including you, will soon be dead.

But you’re not, now, are you? No. You
Are somewhere amongst more droning,

While the worn moon still spins around,
And sometimes the Earth does something

Small and wonderful to your mind
Not to do with your and your kind

But a benison, as when rain
And sunlight on the horizon

Align with horizontal clouds
To make lines of cloud fire rainbows.

Well. Your news will still break your heart,
But world can’t end. World only starts.

This Pesty Fly

When you had a smaller daughter,

You used to read her Eric Carle.

In The Very Busy Spider

Denouement, his busy spider,

Who’s been building her web all book,

Completes it, then catches a fly.

Each time you spoke it to daughter,

There was one word from a rooster,

Inviting the busy spider

To dine on the fly, caught your eye.

That colorful rooster noticed,

Not an annoying, pesky fly,

But, rather grandly, a pesty fly.

Who could ignore a pesty fly?

Tonight, a few weeks after Carle,

Cherished to a ripe old age, died,

You sat out in the liminal,

Luminal evening of the first

Day of September while bothered

By one determined pesty fly,

As you tried to compose your lines,

Which made you think of Eric Carle,

And change those lines and add more lines

In memory of his writing

And the art of one small word caught,

Just so, just strange enough to make

A reader remember and long

For the spider to eat the fly.

Dancing Ghosts

Why does that seem charming?
How whimsical are you?
Or are you just gothic?

All the unreal topics
That real words keep in mind!
Sometimes we’re exhausted

Holding up the crystal
Sphere of the imagined
Nonexistent cosmos,

Including old Atlas
Himself, for you. Words do
Things no other real things

Can do, netting the gone
And hauling up false heaps
Of arrangements structured

In impossible ways,
Moore’s garden and toads both,
Will’s inhabited air,

The whole claptrap of thought
As imagination,
The chimeric wonders

Dragging broken echoes,
Repurposed memories,
For your satisfaction,

For your entertainment—
So much to keep dancing
As your ghosts but stay us.

A Brown Deposit Resembling Soil

Dictionaries have their comic twists,
Intentional or not, as in this
Definition, not for what you may
First think, but in fact for humble peat.
Rot and corpses and decay make fuel.

All waste, by definition not fuel
For whatever system wasted it,
Is fuel—the cosmos will recycle
All of this, and all your knowledge is
Only the not-yet digested bits.

Function Crushed

I just smash them, he said, of unwanted
Insects in response to someone saying
That she flushed them and someone else

Replying, no she froze them, having read
Insects can survive and thrive in sewers.
I just smash them, he said, No machine

Can function crushed. There’s a question.
Is there something, any behaving thing,
That can keep on behaving crushed?

Some shapeless, hopeless, unreal soul,
Some indefatigable cockroach of longing?
Rusted thoughts twitched in the dust.

Wild Horses and Ancient Fishing

But not both at once,

Not around here, where

Wild horses are more

Recent than ancient,

The streams too narrow,

Washes seasonal,

Crayfish more common

Than abundant trout—

Even fisher-folk

In ancient, lean times

Only fished part time.

Still, you see a sign

Advertising art

Shows in Durango,

And you consider

Why it sounds so fine

In an age of roads,

Signals through the skies,

International

Supply chains, the world

Arguably more

Gaia than ever,

To contemplate Wild

Horses or Ancient

Fishing—the hard lives

Bright, evocative,

Your mind hooked and caught

By something moving

Through phrases, small wild

Otherness in words.

A Dark and Gentle Rain

Morning night, night morning,
The peculiar small hours
Of a pitch dark new day,

Scent of wet Russian sage
In the desert courtyard
In the rare desert rain—

You could say the world’s
Lost and gone off to hell,
And it has, always was—

You could say the world’s
Gone away, that it fades—
It does. You’re alone

One hour in the courtyard
In the dark, as it rains—
Which just means a new day.